Facilitating Active Learning with Inexpensive Mobile Robots

Our educational system must nurture a student's ability to acquire knowledge. Research has proven that active learning, learning promoted by interacting with one's environment, as opposed to lectures, is most effective in developing a students ability to acquire knowledge. In the computer science domain, active learning can be facilitated by using mobile robots in a collaborative setting. We believe that a context-based, collaborative approach, combined with the excitement, motivation, and real-world experiences provided by a robot, provide a nearly optimal method of teaching students how to acquire knowledge about computer science. However, this methodology has not seen wide acceptance. In order to facilitate the use of robots we have developed an inexpensive wheeled robot that uses common parts and requires only a simple set of tools for assembly. An abstracted Java interface allows students to interact with the robot from any desktop computer using the simple commands provided. Additionally, students can develop sophisticated distributed software solutions that require only simple changes to the interface, and development of software for both the embedded microcontroller and desktop machine. Our approach makes a wide variety of robot-based projects accessible to all level of courses, and for even the smallest computer science departments